Beck's “Plan,” Day 1: The Flat Tax

This week on his Fox News program, Glenn Beck is laying out “The Plan,” a series of proposals he has developed with the assistance of conservative think tanks for “slashing the budget,” which he claims is necessary for the United States “to survive.”

Today, Beck signed off on Reagan administration economist Art Laffer's proposal to:

  • Replace all personal federal taxes with an 11 percent flat tax on personal unadjusted gross income, and an 11 percent Value Added Tax (VAT).

Both the flat tax and the VAT are more regressive taxes than we have now; they would cause people at low and middle income taxes to pay far more than they do now, while possibly providing very large cuts for high income earners like Beck. Laffer told Beck that these taxes would “match the total revenue we collect today.” Laffer based this figure on his theory, the Laffer curve, which Nobel Prize winning economist Paul Krugman, numerous Bush administration officials, and others have sharply criticized as a justification for reducing taxes in the United States.

Beck also teased other parts of “The Plan,” which he will fully unveil later in the week. These included "massive budget cuts all across the board" and Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security "going away."